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I actually had some rather interesting dealings with the local banks yesterday. Most of my euros are in one of the largest ones. I'm often greeted by the assistant manager when I visit, and she sometimes handles my business personally. Probably because she's one of the most fluent speakers of English in the branch (which isn't really saying much), and my handling of the local language tends to be painful to hear.
Well, yesterday I wanted to ask her if there was any appropriate 'response' to the current financial situation, and she suddenly couldn't say anything. No capish, no capish. I was pretty offended. She knows full well that I'm not really comfortable with the economic situation, but she sure as heck wasn't going to say anything that could possibly be interpreted by any stretch of the imagination as advice. My best guess is that the bank has warned the employees not to say anything that the customers can blame the bank for--as though they are expecting a shower of blame to develop into a typhoon. My main impression was that they are running seriously scared, even though she didn't say a single word directly to that effect.
Being rather offended, I made a maximum one-day withdrawal (which isn't very large under the latest legitimate-customer-harassing regulations) and took it to a different bank that I've been considering for a while. I only dealt with low-level flunkies at that bank, and they did seem quite eager to get my business--but it was still a pain in the arse to deal with the usual legitimate-customer-harassing regulations. I very nearly gave up before getting the account open, but I finally went ahead with it... The decisive factor was that I spoke to two employees who used more English in one afternoon than I'd heard in a couple of years from the big bank.
I think the most annoying part at the new bank was that they claim to offer investment advice, but not really. Specific case in point is that I want to get more money out of the local currency, but they could make no recommendations about any of the alternative currencies that they can handle. In particular, I feel the euro is priced about as high as it will go (but I might well be mistaken), so I was interested in some alternative. I'm still convinced that the Chinese yuan is substantially undervalued--but I still can't buy it--at least not directly. However, it seems likely that the Hong Kong dollar or the Singapore dollar might be linked to the Chinese currency and might therefore benefit when the Chinese currency is finally repriced. However they couldn't answer any questions about any relationships among those currencies, not even as to which one is more closely linked to the yuan.
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